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Era of the Normans
The '''Era of the Normans' lasted from about 978 AD until 1095 AD. It began with reign of King Ethelred the Unready of England, which would set in motion the events leading to the Norman conquest of England. It then ended on the eve of the Crusading Age. The Early Middle Ages laid the foundation of Western civilisation, but it can also be seen as a long period of slumber for the West. This lethargy was shaken in the 11th-century by a new sense of self-confidence, exemplified by the Normans. These descendants of Vikings settled in Northern France, where they took to French feudalism, Christianity, language, customs, legal system, and warfare. Within a few generations, the Dukes of Normandy had been transformed into one of the most powerful magnates in France, and possibly the most ferocious military forces in Europe. If the Normans inherited one trait from the Viking forefathers, perhaps it was wanderlust: in 1066, William the Conqueror crossed the Channel to conquered Anglo-Saxon England. The Western Christian Church too had a new aggressive attitude. Under a series of great reforming popes, beginning with Leo IX (1049-54), the Church standardised clerical practices and vigorously cracked-down on corruption. The long developing estrangement between eastern and western Christendom finally resulted in the Great Schism of 1054, the permanent breach between the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches. Meanwhile, for these reforming popes, the continued subordination of the Church to secular rulers was not their intention, prompting the first great clash of the protected medieval power struggle between Church and state, the Investiture Controversy (1076-1122). There thus emerged the more uncompromising and militant form of Christianity that would increasingly characterise Europe between the late-11th and 13th centuries. It also provided a licence for the predatory appetites of the military class; they could spoil the Muslim with clear consciences. Again the Normans were in the vanguard, taking Sicily from the Arabs, as well as swallowing the last Byzantine possessions in southern Italy; they would also provided much of the firepower of the First Crusade. The Spaniards too had come to see the Reconquista as a religious cause. In the year 1000, there were few signs of the astonishing success that European civllisation would enjoy in the second millennium. Paris and London were disease ridden firetraps with barely 25,000 people, that could not approached in magnificence Constantinople, Córdoba, Baghdad, Kaifeng, Hangzhou, or Kyoto. Nevertheless, as it turned out, the Vikings and the Hungarians were the last of the wave of invasions that Europe would endure. In contrast, India would come under successive disruptions by Muslim invaders from the 11th-century, and China would succumb in the 13th-century to the rule of a Mongol dynasty, the Yuan. These more settled conditions in Europe would allow a tremendous period of growth during the High Middle Age (1000-1337); an expansion of population, urbanisation, and the economy, as well as artistic, political, and intellectual creativity. History Europe in 11th Century In the year 1000, there were few signs of the astonishing success that European civllisation would enjoy in the second millennium. Indeed, most Europeans weren't even aware of the turn of the millennium, since counting the years from the birth of Christ was by no means yet the norm; most realms used the regnal year, such as the 4th year of the reign of Robert II of France. It would seem at a glance that little had been accomplished in the centuries since the fall of the Western Roman Empire. This was a world of very slow population growth; approximate estimates suggest that a Europe of about thirty million people in 500, had grown to just forty million by 1000. This was a society based overwhelmingly on subsistence agriculture where the weight of tradition was enormous and unquestioned. There was relatively little commerce, little government control, and violence was simply an accepted part of life. There were very few urban centres, none of which could approached in magnificence Constantinople, Córdoba, or Baghdad, all of which had populations of half-a-million or more; by comparison Paris and London were disease ridden firetraps with barely 25,000. There was very little literacy, with even a king sometimes being illiterate far into the Middle Ages; a problem made worse by the lack of a suitable writing medium, since parchment was expensive, and paper only slowly spread northwards from Muslim Spain. What little learning there was, was a monopoly of the Christian Church. A few things explain the tremendous period of population, economic, and urban growth that Europe would enjoy in the High Middle Age (978-1337). Firstly, as it turned out, the Viking and Magyar (Hungarian) invasions were the last intruders that Europe would experience; or at least the last for Western Europe since the East would still have to endure the Mongol invasions of the 13th-century. Even the Mediterranean had been somewhat pacified thanks to the Byzantines clearing the sea of pirates during its revival under the Macedonian Dynasty (867-1056). The second part of the explanation lies in the spread of Christianity throughout Europe, with the conversion of Scandinavia, Iceland, Hungary, Russia, Bulgaria, and the Slavs. Europe was becoming increasingly culturally homogeneous based on Christian and Frankish practices; saints names such as John and Germanic names like Henry were common even in Ireland and Scandinavia; and the use of royal charters, coins, the ritual homage, and coats-of-arms all became generalised. Christendom thus brought this diverse collection of polities into a shared cultural area, with political alliances and trade networks. Christianity also came to define Europe’s purpose, and religious zeal would motivate continued expansion, to the Holy Lands at least temporarily with the Crusading Age, to Sicily with the Norman conquest, to the Baltic with the Northern Crusades of the 12th and 13th centuries, and to the extension of Christian Spain with the Reconquista. And the final part of the explanation was the steady weakening of free peasantry, as determined local lord concentrated control of land in their own hands and coerced agricultural labour into subjection. The ultimate result was that the elites became rich in surplus, which formed the base of the extension of urbanization and trading connections. Pioneered by the Vikings, the North Sea and Baltic Sea steadily developed as a trade route, with a network of coastal ports the foci of exchange of all kinds. Christian Church in 11th Century The Early Middle Age had been a period of great progress for the Church, with Christianity spreading into Scandinavia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Poland, and Russia, as well as among the Slavs. But beyond demographic expansion, the health of the religious institution had reached a low point of spiritual decline. At the episcopal level, it became more and more difficult to maintain moral excellence at all times of material temptations. Enormous feudal land, wealth and power was attached to bishops of cities and abbots of monasteries, and high clerical offices became the almost exclusive domain of members of the great feudal families. These clerics focused less on the religion than on using church property to support their family's revenue. Meanwhile, kings, as well as the more powerful feudal lords, began to appoint bishops and abbots; this was particularly notable in the Germanic Holy Roman Empire, but the practice was common throughout Europe. As the Church became inseparable from the feudal system, political as opposed to spiritual criteria came to dominate their selection. Such conditions opened the way to simony, the auctioning of Church posts to the highest bidder, or even passing from father to son with back-sliding from clerical celibacy. Furthermore, churches and monasteries had suffered greatly at the hands of Viking raiders, and at every level discipline and learning were in decline. This malaise continued into the papacy in Rome. Italy was a crowded hodgepodge of rival petty-states, popes were invariably elected based not on their piety, but on their political skills as a secular ruler capable of protecting the Papal State. In general, they were either nominees of a Germanic Holy Roman Emperors, or ascended through factional struggles among the Roman urban nobility. The latter were actually poorer than the German candidates, with Pope John XII (956-963) being particularly infamous as a morally corrupt power seekers. Some in the Church were appalled by this moral decline and subservience to secular rulers. In Burgundy, a group of earnest clerics were able to persuade Duke William I of Aquitane (d. 918) to found the Abbey of Cluny on a modest scale in 910. Patrons normally expected to install their kinsmen as abbots, but William released Cluny from all future obligation to him and his family, putting the position of abbot beyond secular interference. Four of the first eight abbots of Cluny were later canonised; seven of them were outstanding men. Cluny's founders instituted strict adherence to the Rule of St. Benedict, eliminating any potential idle time by a heavy schedules of communal prayer, in addition to fieldwork and manuscript reproduction. Cluniac monks attained a high level of sustainable piety and discipline. Furthermore, Cluny-based monasteries proliferated throughout France and Western Europe, all supervised by priors subordinate to the abbot of the mother-house itself, thus maintaining unity of practice. For nearly two-and-a half-centuries, Cluny's abbots advised popes, acted as their legates, and threw their weight behind the moral and spiritual reform of the Church; later called the Gregorian Reform movement. Between 1046 and 1049, Henry III of Imperial Germany had appointed a string of Popes, his last being Pope Leo IX (1049-54), who was of tremendous significance. Leo was a man of immense reforming zeal, who spent barely six months of his five years as pontiff in Rome. Instead he moved from synod to synod throughout Italy, Germany, and France, imposing standard clerical practices, punishing transgressions, and checking on secular interference. Several clerics were deposed for purchasing their office, replaced by more reform-oriented men. This was when the practice of priestly celibacy began to become more widespread; priest were formally forbidden from marrying in 1139, and reaffirmed in 1563. Leo also made strides to make the Church independent from secular rulers and Roman lay nobility by establishing the College of Cardinals as any advisory body, which he stacked with close reforming colleagues. He was fortunate that the next two papal elections would occur during the minority of Henry IV of Imperial Germany, and the cardinals seized the opportunity to elect a Pope themselves without even consulting the regents; the College thus established its central role in all future elections. Another major event of Leo's papacy was the Great Schism of 1054 that permanently split Christendom into the Latin Christianity (Catholic) and Eastern Orthodox Christianity. On Saturday 16 July 1054, as afternoon prayers were about to begin, the legate of Pope Leo IX strode into the Cathedral of Hagia Sophia, and placed on the main altar a papal bull that declared the patriarch of Constantinople to be excommunicated. A week later the patriarch in turn excommunicated the Pope. The immediate cause of the quarrel was the Normans replacing Greek bishops with Latin ones in the wake of their conquest of southern Italy. At the time of the mutual excommunication, contemporary chroniclers did not consider the event significant; probably neither man expected the schism would be permanent. In truth no single event marked the beginning of the Great Schism, the two Churches had been unofficially fractured for centuries. The primary cause was conflicting claims of papal authority; the Pope saw himself as the Vicar of Christ with supreme authority over all of Christendom, while the Patriarch in Constantinople considered the Pope merely the first among equals of the five great bishoprics (Rome, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria). The Pope's claim was in part based on a document known as the Donation of Constantine, ''which is today recognised as one of the greatest forgeries in history. There were spiritual and ecclesiastical differences such as the use of unleavened bread in the Eucharist or clerical celibacy or the ''Filioque, a subtle disagreement over the nature of the Holy Spirit that derived from the efforts of the Eastern Church to accommodate her Monophysite minority. The Iconoclastic Controversy of the 8th and 9th centuries particularly poisoned relations between east and west; opposition to icons seems to have had little support in the West, and Rome took a consistently Iconodule position. Put simply, the Eastern and Western Churches facing different political realities, simply evolving differently, and allowing minor divergences to harden into an irreconcilable rifts. By the 10th-century, the two had clearly become rivals for influence especially in Eastern Europe, with Rome winning Hungary and Poland, while resenting the lose of Bulgaria to Constantinople. Several attempts at reconciliation did not bear fruit, and the sack of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204 ultimately sealed the schism permanently. It remains to today, though in 1964 Pope Paul VI embraced Patriarch Athenagoras I on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, a symbolic gesture of friendship between the two Churches; the mutual excommunications were formally nullified the following year. Pope Leo IX was just the first of a series of great reforming and uncompromising popes, for whom the continued subordination of the Catholic Church to secular rulers was not their intention. This prompted the protected medieval power struggle between Church and state, that began with the Investiture Controversy (1076-1122) against the most powerful ruler in Europe at the time; Henry IV of Imperial Germany. It was followed by similar turmoil in England over Thomas Becket in the 12th-century, and culminated in the struggle with King Philip IV of France in the 13th-century. Yet the Christianity of the age has about it much which now seems repellent. Establishment gave Christians power they did not hesitate to use. The Crusading Age was one expression of the aggressive and militant form of Christianity that would characterise Europe between the 11th and 13th centuries. Rise of the Normans In the 10th century, no one could have foreseen that the Norman would become one of the most powerful feudal states of Western Europe, going on to leave a deep imprint across the continent from the British Isles to southern Italy, and on to the Near East and Jerusalem. The immediate descendants of Rollo's Vikings and their French wives faced an uncertain future, surrounded by predatory neighbours and the French crown always looking for an excuse to reclaim its lost territory. The duchy was put on firmer footing during the long reign of Rollo's grandson, Duke Richard I (942-96). His father had been assassinated by the Normandy's most powerful neighbour, Flanders, and King Louis IV of France (936–954) overran the duchy taking Richard hostage. That would have been the end for Normandy, except the Normans did not hesitate to invite some Vikings to pillage the Seine Valley until the king got the message and released Richard. For the next 49 years, Richard was able to concentrate on reforming his realm, based on land ownership, feudal hierarchy, and efficient government. The Normans did not completely lose touch with their Viking past, and pagan warbands were long welcomed in Norman ports to overwinter and sell their booty; his fellow French nobles called Richard the Duke of the Pirates. As with everything they did, the Normans embraced Christianity with a fierce enthusiasm. His ancestors had burn monasteries, but Richard was a generous patron of the Church, and restored their lands. One of the Normans' favourite projects was the island monastery of Le Mont-Saint-Michel, which soon became one of the most spectacular examples of Norman architecture. Richard was also a key supporter of the election of Hugh Capet (987-996) to the French throne, his brother-in-law. By the end of his reign, Normandy was a fully functioning medieval state. It was under his son, Richard II (996–1026), that the Normans fully gained their identity. He closed the Norman ports to Vikings, and in exchange his sister Emma married King Ethelred II of England. He also commissioned a pro-French history of the duchy, propaganda at its finest, which portrayed his ducal ancestors as morally upright Christian leaders who built Normandy, despite the treachery of their overlords and neighboring principalities. By his death, Richard had turned around the perception of Normandy, and transformed it into one of the most powerful provinces of France; he was a personal friend of the French king, the brother-in-law of the English king. And having adapted to the French style of warfare, the Normans were becoming the most ferocious military forces in Europe; their armoured cavalry charges were virtually irresistible. Like their Viking ancestors, they displayed a love of fighting, an almost reckless courage, an extreme restlessness, and a craftiness that went hand in hand with outrageous treachery. It made them a wonderful machine for conquest. By the reign of Robert I (1027-35), Norman influence extended into neighbouring Flanders and Brittany, and when King Robert II of France (996-1031) was briefly deposed in a palace coup, it was Normandy that helped restore him to his throne. He provided the foundations for the great heights yet to come. Robert's son would become the most famous Norman in history, William the Conqueror, and Norman wanderlust, hunger for land, wealth and power would see their influence spread to across Europe and beyond. Norman Conquest of England The decades following its unification in 925 were a productive time for Anglo-Saxon England: a measure of administrative uniformity was gradually achieved with all the king’s dominion divided into shires, boroughs, and hundreds on the pattern of those of Wessex; and a great revival of monasticism. It was only when ability failed in Alfred the Great’s line, under Ethelred II (978-1013), that the English monarchy came to grief. In the 980s, a fresh wave of Viking raiders hammered northern Europe, in part prompted by the Danish King Harald Bluetooth (d. 986) trying to impose Christianity onto his domain. The raiders did so well that Harald's son, Sweyn Forkbeard (d. 1014), decided to take over the campaign himself. In 991, a major Danish incusion sacked Ipswich and easily defeated the English forces sent against them at the Battle of Maldon (August 991). Thus Ethelred decided that he would pay an annual bribe to the Danes in a system known as Danegeld. Unsurprisingly this was neither popular with his subjected, nor an effective solution since it only encouraged the Danes to come back for more. The judgement of history has not been kind, and Ethelred has been known ever since as Ethelred the Unready; this is somewhat unfair since many of his predecessors had made such payments, even the vaunted Alfred himself. The Viking often used the Norman ports as launchpads for assaults on England, and to prevent this, Ethelred formed an alliance with Duke Richard II of Normandy (d. 1026) by marrying his daughter Emma. Unfortunately, the diplomatic triumph went straight to his head, and he carried out a surprise massacre of many Danes still living in England; the St. Brice's Day Massacre (November 1002). The inevitable response was a series of escalating raids, that culminated in 1013 with Sweyn Forkbeard personally leading his forces in a full-scale invasion of England. The English were tired of their weak king, and Sweyn found an unexpectedly easy conquest; since he was already a Christian he was not met with the usual suspicion accorded a Viking. There was little real resistance, and by the end of the year, the Dane was sitting on the English throne, while Ethelred, his wife Emma, and their younger sons were living in exile in Normandy. When Sweyn died in 1014, Ethelred tried to reclaim his throne, but with some difficulty Sweyn's son Cnut the Great (1016-35) eventually prevailed as king of England. To shore up his legitimacy and remove the threat of Norman support for her sons, Cnut married Ethelred's widow, Emma of Normandy. There thus emerged the complex family links between the Anglo-Saxon, Norman and Danish monarchies; Ethelred's natural son, the future King Edward the Confessor, had Cnut as a stepfather and Richard II of Normandy as an uncle. By all accounts, for thirteen years Cnut ruled England very effectively, respecting Anglo-Saxon traditions and encouraging intermarriage between the Danes and English. He went on claim the crowns of Norway and parts of Sweden too. Cities such as London and York flourished as important links in maritime trade routes that stretched from the Baltic Sea to North Sea, and on to Ireland where the Danes had a strong interests even after the Battle of Clontarf. With such a vast realm, Cnut naturally delegated considerable power to trusted nobles, dividing England into four great earldoms (Wessex, East Anglia, Mercia, and Northumbria); a change that placed much power and wealth in the hands of a few favoured Anglo-Saxon houses. There was no attempt to restore the Anglo-Saxon line when Canute died in 1035, and he was followed by his two natural sons. However, both their reigns were short-lived, and the crown was eventually inherited by Cnut's native Anglo-Saxon stepson, Edward the Confessor (1042-66). The troubles of the reign came from the great nobles, such as Earl Godwin of Wessex, who had become excessively powerful through collaborating with Cnut's regime. Edward was a vigorous and ambitious who tried to play the nobles against one another, and filled his administration with his men especailly Norman friends; Edward had spent most of his life in exile in Normandy. Resentment at the king's foreigner advisors finally boiled over in 1051, when the king appointed a Norman bishop as archbishop of Canterbury, over a relative of Godwin. When Earl Godwin defied a king's order, Edward seized the chance to bring his over-mighty vassal to heel, but in the end, the practical Anglo-Saxon nobles feared a civil war would leave the country open to foreign threats, and forced the king to make terms. Meanwhile, Edward failed to produce an heir. The traditional explanation is that Edward was very pious and had taken a vow of chastity, though the evidence is very ambiguous; it's largely based on a biography commissioned by his widow, who would have good reason to promoting the idea that the childless marriage was no her fault. As an English succession crisis loomed, Edward tried to recall a cousin living in Hungary, who had also escaped into exile during Cnut's conquest, but he died shortly after reaching England in mysterious circumstances. Edward the Confessor died in January 1066, and was buried in the magnificent cathedral he had commissioned, Westminster Abbey; it was built on the same design as Jumièges Abbey in Normandy. At least according to partisan sources, Edward reconciled with Godwin's son Earl Harold Godwinson of Wessex (d. 1066) on his deathbed, and named him his successor; to be more precise, Harold was nominated king, and accepted by an assembly of great Anglo-Saxon nobles. Harold was crowned king the next day, but two of the most powerful rulers in Europe also had claims to the throne; King Harald Hardrada of Norway (d. 1066) based on a supposed agreement with Cnut's sons to restore Scandinavian rule in England; and Duke William of Normandy, the cousin of Edward through his great-aunt, Emma of Normandy. The succession of any medieval ruler was always an invitation to chaos, and that of William the Conqueror (1035-87) more than most. William had to overcome enormous obstacles; he was illegitimate, the only son of Duke Robert I of Normandy (1027-35), and became duke at just eight-years-old. With a child on the throne, Normandy gradually descended into anarchy, as nobles carved out virtually independent fiefdoms for themselves, building unauthorised castles and waging private wars throughout the province. His relatives and advisers were of little help, fighting among themselves for preeminence and treating William as a pawn. Three of William’s guardians and his tutor died violent deaths, and the young duke narrowly escaped assassination on more than one occasion. In 1042, William was fifteen-years-old, by the standards of the time a man, and ready to assert himself in the affairs of his duchy. It is not surprising that William would emerge as a formidable personality; he must have had reserves of strength to survive such a childhood. He had no patience for the fractious guardians who had held the reins of power for him. Dismissing them, he surrounded himself with new advisors, mostly young and talented individuals who would stay with him for the rest of his life, and become in time some of the largest landowners in England. William's attempt to bring his disobedient vassals to heel inevitably led a series of rebellions, and the period from 1046 until 1055 saw almost continuous warfare. The making of the young duke was victory over a coalition of Norman rebels at the Battle of Val-ès-Dunes (1047), in which he allied with King Henry I of France (1031-1060); the French crown had good reason to want a weak duke propped-up by royal power. Afterwards, William held a great peace council near the site of the battle, where the assembled nobles swore solemn oaths, endorsed by the Church, to respect the duke's peace. The next few years saw him slowly and methodically recover his lost ducal prestige, rights, and revenues, and by the 1050s, he was able to participate in events outside his duchy. In 1051, he married Matilda of Flanders, a formidable personality in her own right, who brought him a powerful ally; uncharacteristically for a Norman duke, they would remain faithful to each other their whole lives. At first the Pope forbade the marriage because the pair were distant cousins, but they got married anyway and then did penance, commissioning the twin cathedrals, the Abbaye aux Hommes and Abbaye aux Dames in Caen. In support of King Henry, William also fought a series of campaigns against the growing power of the Count of Anjou. But alliances quickly shifted in feudal Europe. Now threatened by William's growing mastery of his duchy, Henry and Anjou reconciled in 1054, and launched an invasion of Normandy. The invasion was particularly ill-timed for William, coinciding with yet another rebellion by two of his uncles. William decided on a policy of falling back and bidding his time. Meeting little resistance, the king was lulled into complacency, and the Normans were able to launch a surprise attack in the middle of the night at the Battle of Morteme (1054), that prompted Henry to withdraw in dismay with heavy losses. The rebellion also collapsed, leaving William in complete mastery of Normandy, with a fearsome military reputation to boot. But King Henry wasn't finished. He again marched into Normandy in 1057, intent on bringing this upstart duke to heel. William refused to engage his overlord, until an opportunity presented itself as the royal army was crossing the Dives River. With half the army across, he pounced and Henry was forced to watch impotently from the other side as the disastrous Battle of Varaville (August 1057) unfolded. Three years later, the king was dead, and eight-year-old Philip I of France (1060-1108) was on the throne, under the guardianship of William’s father-in-law, Robert of Flanders. The Count of Anjou were also dead, and Anjou descended into civil war, which William took advantage of by seizing Maine in 1063. For the first time in his life, William was free from external threats and secure in one of the richest duchies in northern France. Brimming with confidence, he turned his eyes across the Channel, at the largest centralised states in Western Europe. William's claim to the English throne was dubious at best: he was a first cousin of Edward the Confessor through his great aunt, Emma of Normandy; he claimed the English king, who he had known since childhood, once promised him the throne; and also claimed that when Harold Godwinson was in Normandy probably to secure the release of his imprisoned brother, he had sworn an oath on holy relics to support William’s claim, no doubt under duress. As soon as Harold was crown, William began preparing a full-scale military invasion of England, gathering an army perhaps 8,000 strong including 2,000 cavalry, and a fleet of 400 ships. In England, King Harold Godwinson assembled his own army on the south coast, but the invasion when came, arrived not from Normandy, but from the north. Without warning King Harald Hardrada of Norway (1046-66) invaded northern England to press his own claim to the English throne. He easily overran the local forces, and seized York. However King Harold Godwinson acted decisively, force-marching his army 200-miles north in an astonishing four days. The sudden appearance of the English army caught the Norwegians completely by surprise. Hardrada should have retreated to his ship to regroup, but his blood was up, and he charged into the Battle of Stamford Bridge (September 1066). Even with half his army and ill-prepared, the Norwegians were a formidable foes, and the battle raged for hours, but in the end Harald along with most of the Norwegians were killed; of 240 ships, only 24 were needed to carry the survivors back to Norway. This battle is sometimes used to mark the end of the Viking Age. There was little time to savoir the victory. Just three days later, William of Normandy landed his own invasion force unopposed on the south coast, after a string of delays and unfavourable winds. Repeating his epic march, Harold Godwinson was back in London within four days to plan the defence of the realm. In was only then that the exhausted Harold got word that William had brought with him both the holy relics Harold had been force to swear upon in Normandy, and a papal bull giving the Pope's blessing to William's invasion; the Norman had always been fervent supported of the Church. On Saturday 14 October 1066, a single battle between less than 20,000 men would changed the course of history in England and beyond; the Battle of Hastings (October 1066). The English soldiers formed-up on foot as a shield wall, the traditional way of fighting, tried and tested over the centuries. Confronting them was something startlingly new in English warfare, a Norman army consisting of mounted cavalry, infantry, and archers; roughly proportioned 1-2-1. Yet against all expectations, Harold's shield-wall held and William's army was thrown back again and again. Both sides suffered heavy casualties; Harold's two brothers were killed and William had three horse cut from under him. But as the day wore on, Norman archers and cavalry charges began to take their tole, and the shield-wall began to shrink in on itself. Then in the late afternoon, a chance arrow struck and killed Harold Godwinson; the Bayeux tapestry is the only evidence for the tradition that it hit him in the eye. When Harold's standard fell, the end came quickly; the wall broke and a route ensuing. With no one of stature remaining to raise a new army, William the Conqueror (1066-87) met little resistance on his march to London, where he was crowned king at Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1066. The new cathedral had had an eventful first year, with one royal funeral and two coronations. William secured his new kingdom with exemplary thoroughness. The conquest was not achieved at a single stroke, and major uprisings continued for several years: the sons of Harold Godwinson tried to invade several times from exile in Ireland; a cousin of Edward the Confessor fled into exile in Scotland and stirred up trouble to the north; and guerilla fighters like the legendary Hereward the Wake repeatedly tried to throw-off the "Norman Yoke". The most serious resistance was in the north, where the people were much more bound to Scandinavia than Normandy. The Normans brutally suppressed the rebels by starving them into submission with the so-called Harrying of the North (1069–71), laying waste to the northern countryside. According to the chronicles, William celebrated Christmas of 1070 in the ruins of York. William used these revolts as an excuse to confiscate English land and distributed it among his Norman followers, serving the king in a network of feudal obligations. The Church elite did not escape notice either, with almost all bishops being replaced by Norman ones. To secure his hold on the country, the English landscape was soon transformed by the construction of hundreds of wooden motte-and-bailey castles. These were unlike anything seen in England before, for Anglo-Saxon fortifications were walled towns to shelter the people from Viking raiders. Norman castles were compact military bases designed to defend the power of the new ruling class. Many of these castles would later be replaced by monumental towers of stone, among them the central keep of the Tower of London, the White Tower. By 1080, the Norman conquest of England was celebrated as a fait accompli, with the commissioning of the exceptional Bayeux Tapestry. Good administration required detailed information about the country, thus William carried out one of the most remarkable administrative accomplishments of the Middle Ages, the compilation of a vast survey of England for royal purposes.The listing for each county gives all the landholdings of each noble, who owned the land before the conquest, its value, its tax assessment, and the number of peasants, ploughs, and any other resources; towns were listed separately. The document acquired the colloquial name ''Domesday Book ''(1086), a''n allusion to the ''Day of Judgement because the commissioners’ findings were final. Domesday starkly reveals the almost total replacement of the Anglo-Saxon ruling-class by a much smaller number of Normans: William and his close family directly possessed about 20% of the land in England; 50% was held by vassals of the crown; 25% was in the hands of the Christian Church; and leaving a bare 5% to the surviving Anglo-Saxon nobility. Some Anglo-Saxon nobles fled into exile in Scotland, notably Margaret of Wessex who married King Malcolm III Dunkeld of Scotland (1058-93), and worked tirelessly to make the kingdom strong enough to resist conquest from the south. The Byzantine Empire became another popular destination for Anglo-Saxon exiles, as the empire was in need of mercenaries. To his English subjects, William remained a foreign tyrant throughout his reign. It seems the feeling was reciprocated, for he never bothered to learn the language, and spent as much time as he dared at home in Normandy. On his death in 1087, William divided his three sons. Tellingly, to his eldest son he left his favourite part, the Duchy of Normandy, while the throne of England went to his younger son. Strong centralised government continued under William's two sons, William II (1087-1100) and Henry I (1100-1135). It was often a harsh rule, but there was also a sense of fair dealing. A charter of liberties was issued on the coronation of Henry I that laid-out various commitment regarding the treatment of his nobles and church officials; it has been seen as a precursor of Magna Carta a century later. Nevertheless, royal authority was absolute, with central government steadily strengthen with additional institutions. England was already developing under the Anglo-Saxons into a sophisticated kingdom but Norman rule certainly accelerated that process. The royal exchequer began to develop from 1110, used to collect and audit revenues from the king's sheriffs and royal officials from all over England; the name refers to the chequer-pattern counting cloth used to perform calculations. Circuit court justices with wide-ranging powers were sent out into the shires to inspect local courts, to hear appeals to the crown, to visit the holdings of any vassal, and other matters of interest or profit for the king. The impact of Norman rule on English society is difficult to assess. One of the more obvious effects was the introduction of French as the language of the ruling classes, and had a lasting influence on English syntax and vocabulary. Thousands of French words would eventually enter the English language, which is why the modern language has so many different words with the same meaning, such as "royal" from the French and "king" from the Old English, or "beef" from the French and "cow" from the Old English, or "amorous" from the French and "loving" from the Old English. Another shift was the usage of names common in France. Today Anglo-Saxon names such as Egbert, Athelstan, and Ethelred sound strange, while Norman names like William, Robert and Richard seem quintessentially English. The English Church was also brought more fully into line with developments on the Continent: the first reforming Cluniac monastery was established at Lewes in 1077; and new stone cathedrals were built in the Norman-Romanesque style such as at Winchester, York, and Canterbury. Finally, Henry reunited his fathers realm encompassing England and Normandy in 1106, after a series of violent struggles with his brothers; he probably assassinated his brother William on a hunting trip, and overthrew his brother Robert at the Battle of Tinchebray (September 1106) who spent the rest of his life imprisoned. But the Duke of Normandy had always been the vassal of the French king, and the fact that they were kings of England in their own rights didn't change that. In the coming centuries, the politics, economics, and cultures of England and Franch became intertwined with sometimes drastic consequences, especially when the French monarchy began to reassert itself in the 13th-century. The roots of Hundred Years’ War in the 14th-century can be traced back to the Norman conquest of England. William's sons worked harder to smooth the differences between Anglo-Saxon and Norman societies; Henry married the daughter of an Anglo-Saxon noblewoman and the Scottish king, and encouraged men at court to marry English women. Gradually the cultural differences between the Normans and Anglo-Saxons evaporated: when the Normans settled in France in 911, they were Vikings; when they conquered England in 1066, they were Frenchmen; and in 1169 when they would invade Ireland, they were Englishmen. But the direct line of William the Conquerors only lasted his two sons: William II was probably homosexual and Henry I's only legitimate son died in the wreck of the White Ship in 1120. When Henry died in 1035, the result was a period of civil war known as The Anarchy. Norman Conquest of Southern Italy In the 11th-century began a political development unique to Italy. Viewed on the map, the Italian peninsula seems the most natural of locations for a single kingdom; or the secure heart of an empire as it was in Roman time. It was protected from mainland Europe by the Alps, and on all other sides by the sea. Yet, its geographical position had had precisely the opposite effect. Constantly nibbled at by its neighbours, by the 9th century, Italy was a crowded and ever-shifting hodgepodge of rival petty-states. The north was nominally part of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire, but the real basis of the emperors power was his German kingship, and they rarely visited Italy except to be crowned, leaving it with little central authority. The south was shared the remnants of Justinian's Byzantine holdings and Lombard duchies. The one stable element was the Papal State, running across the middle of the peninsula from Rome and Ravenna. Over the whole fell the shadow of Muslim Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica, from which they raided up-and-down the coast. This complex fragmentation of power would continue throughout the Middle Ages and beyond; as Chancellor Metternich (d. 1859) famously put it, Italy was "only a geographical expression". The 11th-century signalled the end of italy's darkest period. The destructive raids of Magyars (Hungarians) ended at the Battle of Lechfeld, and Mediterranean trade slowly picked up, largely due to the Byzantine navy clearing the sea of Muslim pirates under the Macedonian Dynasty. This led to a rebirth of many of the old Roman cities, as well as the establishment of new ones. While the feudal nobility benefited from the extra spoils on offer, it only accentuated their already brutal rivalries. Prosperous but threatened, the cities sought greater control of their own destiny, enclosing themselves in strong walls, adopting an increasingly independent stance, and developing strong civic councils known as communes. These communes were chosen in a variety of ways, but usually deliberately excluded the nobility, resulting in extremely effective oligarchies of the merchant class; in the early years there were experiments with popular assemblies, but these glimmers of democracy was soon extinguished in favour of a few affluent families. Meanwhile the cities extended their control over the surrounding countryside, becoming City-States. The first of Italy's medieval cities to prosper were those which grew rich through maritime trade, among them the Maritime Republics of Venice, Genoa, Pisa, and Amalfi. Luxury goods bought in the Near East such as spices, dyes, and silks were imported to Italy and then resold throughout Europe. Moreover, the inland city-states such as Florence, Milan, Naples, and Siena profited their position on trade routes, from the rich agricultural land, and their industrious merchant community. The Crusading Age would be the making of Italy. The wars created a constant demand for transportation, naval support, and supplies. More importantly, the maritime republics built lasting trade links throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Fourth Crusade destroyed the Byzantine Empire as a commercial rival. 13th-century Italy would be one of the richest regions of Europe. The 11th-century was a turbulent period for southern Italy, even by Italian standards. After the death of Basil II (d. 1025), Byzantine influence went into sharp decline, and southern Italy became torn-apart by war as the Lombards, Muslims, Germans, and the Papacy sought to take advantage. Yet it was a group of newcomers who most benefited from this chaos; the Normans. The Norman conquest of southern Italy is all the more remarkable for being largely led by a single family, that of a simple knight called Tancred de Hauteville. Virtually nothing is known about Tancred himself, other than that he had twelve sons, and not nearly enough of an inheritance to go around. The family was no doubt aware that the political situation in southern Italy was a golden opportunity for mercenaries, since Norman pilgrims had long been frequent visitors to the region to worship at the shrine to the Archangel Michael in Monte Gargano; the warrior saint was of special importance to the Normans. The first Norman mercenaries arrived in southern Italy around 1000, fighting for all sides, though the Lombards usually made the most generous employers. The first of the Hauteville brothers to make his name in Italy, William, arrived in 1035. He and other Normans fought first for the Byzantines against Muslims, then for the Lombards against the Byzantines, and by 1042 had been granted the lands around Melfi as a fief; later the Duchy of Apulia and Calabria. At first the local population greeted the Normans as liberators, eager to escape the Byzantine tax-collectors, but they soon discovered the rapacious Normans were a good deal worse, squeezing their provinces for every drop of money and acting little better than brigands. Eventually tales of plundering, robbery, murder, and rape provoked a response from the most powerful figure in Italy, Pope Leo IX. He alone had the prestige to pull the scattered powers of Italy into an alliance to drive-off the Normans. Leo led the army himself but suffered total defeat at the Battle of Civitate (June 1053). After the battle, the Pope was treated with every deference, but was no less a prisoner of the Normans; the Normans' religious fervor rarely got in the way of their driving ambition. He was held for nine months until he acknowledged the Norman's conquests in Apulia and Calabria. With their position now secure and Byzantine power in Italy in the midst of a spectacular collapse, one town after another submitted to the Normans, and those that resisted were overwhelmed or fell prey to clever ruses. The last Byzantine stronghold, the city of Bari, fell in 1071, bringing to an end forever the presence of the Roman Empire on Italian shores. By this stage, the Normans now under the leadership of Robert "Guiscard" de Hauteville (d. 1085); his sobriquet means "the crafty". And they were already looking beyond the shores of Italy to Muslim Sicily. At the time Sicily was ripe for conquest, racked by turmoil between warring Arab and Moorish factions. Robert first invaded Sicily in 1061, establishing a foothold in Messina, and defeating a Muslim army at the Battle of Cerami (June 1063) to secure it. But Sicily was a difficult island to conquer, and it was a slow and gruelling campaign. The great city of Palermo was first besieged in 1064, but the Normans made their camp on a hillside infested with tarantulas, and the campaign had to be abandoned. The city finally fell in 1072, and for the rest of Sicily it was only then a matter of time: the stronghold of Trapani fell in 1077; Syracuse capitulated in 1086; and the conquest of Sicily was complete when Noto yielded In February 1091. Roger I Hauteville (d. 1101), the first ruler of Norman Sicily (1071-1198), set the pattern that would characterise it until the early 13th-century. He had conquered the island for Latin Christianity, but continued the Muslim tradition of tolerance for all faiths. Almost unrivalled in medieval Europe, except for Spain, Latin Christians, Muslims, Orthodox Christians, and Jews interacted on a regular basis in Sicily, and found employment in the administration. The vitality of this multi-cultural melting-pot is evident in exquisite architecture, such as the Cappella Palatina in Palermo. The chapel harmoniously encapsulates a variety of styles: the walls are covered in bright pictorial mosaic in the Byzantine tradition; the vaulted ceiling, carved and painted with intricate patterns is typical of Muslim design; and the sturdy round arches supporting the walls are from Norman Romanesque. Sicily also became a great centre of learning, producing such wonders as the Tabula Rogeriana ''("''The Book of Roger"), a world atlas with illustrations and commentaries by the Arab geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi (d. 1165). It remained the most accurate map of the world until the Age of Discovery, and contained such details as dual sources of the Nile, the coast of Ghana, the caste system of India and rice cultivation in China. The map was commissioned by Roger II Hauteville (1105-54), who by his death had succeeded in uniting all the Norman lands in Italy into a single kingdom with a strong centralized government. The Norman conquests had been an unplanned and chaotic affair, with the Normans (and even the Hauteville brothers) constantly quarreling among themselves, and conquering territories independently as separate duchies and counties. In 1130, Roger's realm encompassing Sicily and southern Italy was elevated to royal rank as a kingdom. The example of the powerful kingdom carved-out in Italy by a few thousand Norman knights of lowly birth did not go unnoticed by the Crusaders. In the early 13th-century, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II spent much time in Sicily studying its sophisticated Muslim-style administrative structure, which some historians consider the first true bureaucratic state in Western Europe since the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Imperial Germany and the Church The death of childless Henry II (1014-24) brought to an end the Saxon dynasty of Otto the Great, which had ruled imperial Germany since 919. Through an assembly of the prince-electors, the imperial crown passed to Conrad II of Franconia (1027-39), the first of the Salian Dynasty (1024-1125). This marked a high point of the Holy Roman Empire: the smooth transition to a new dynasty; a relatively peaceful reign; the eventual seamless succession of his son Henry III (1046-56), and the continuance of the achievements of his Ottonian predecessors, with the imperial crown retaining the great prestige. Nonetheless, the governing structures that he inherited were idiosyncratic, effectively a federated union of powerful regional feudal states with considerable autonomy, and with the paradox of an elected rather than hereditary feudal overlord. Key to the early success of the Salian emperors was continuing the policy of using the Christian Church as a vehicle for imperial control, blurring Charlemagne's idea of protecting the Church into domination. They favoured bishops over secular nobles for appointment to important offices in a proto-bureaucracy answerable directly to the emperor, and often determined who would be nominated to local clerical offices. The Popes themselves seemed to become mere imperial bishops, dismissed at will and replaced with candidates more to their liking. From the middle of the 11th-century the situation began to change, largely due to the so-called Gregorian Reform movement in the Church, which the Holy Roman Empire had done much to promote, encouraging Cluniac monasticism and nominating Pope Leo IX (1049-54), the first of a series of great reforming Popes. Medieval monarchies were fragile things, yet the emperors were granting the Church a degree of autonomy, without possessing any very significant new sources of power. With the unexpected death of Henry III in 1056 and long minority of Henry IV (1056-1105), the initiative passed to the papacy, able to act without fear of intervention from north of the Alps. The battle lines of what would become known as Investiture Controversy '''(1076-1122) were clearly drawn under Pope Nicholas II (1059-61). At the synod held in 1059, Nicholas condemned various abuses within the Church, including simony (the selling of clerical offices), the marriage of clergy, and most controversially reformed the practices of papal elections. Henceforth, the College of Cardinals alone could choose a Pope; imperial influence was clearly his target, for the emperor was left with a nominal veto, nothing more. Meanwhile, the Pope took steps to enlist new allies to protect the papacy. In 1053, Pope Leo IX had taken-up arms to try and drive the Normans from southern Italy, now just six years later Nicholas granted them territorial rights in return for feudal obligations to Rome. Perhaps the emperors were bound to find themselves in conflict with the papacy sooner or later, once it ceased to be in need of their protection against other enemies. Ostensibly the Investiture Controversy centred on whether secular overlords had the authority to “invest” bishops and abbots within their domains; that is, to appoint them and formally give them the robes and insignia of office. At its heart, however, lay the idea of an independent Church, and the struggles for power between the papacy and secular rulers. The overtly political struggle against the German emperor was brought to a head by '''Pope Gregory VII (1073-85). Gregory was far from attractive as a person, but a Pope of great personal and moral courage. He fought all his life for the independence and dominance of the papacy within western Christendom, and was a lover of decisive action without too nice a regard for possible consequences. Once elected, Gregory took the papal throne without imperial assent, simply informing the emperor of the fact. Two years later he issued a decree that forbade any layman from investing a cleric with a bishopric or other ecclesiastical office. The appointment of high clergy was far too valuable a right to be easily relinquished by secular rules, for clerics as the best educated members of medieval society were an important part of any administration. Furthermore, the predecessors of Henry IV had showered vast feudal wealth on the bishoprics and abbeys; the Church would thus be freed from the royal obligations without losing any of its benefits. From a series of threatening letters, the situation quickly escalated: Gregory excommunicated some clerical members of the imperial court accusing them of simony, and Henry installed a new bishop of Milan when another priest had already been chosen by the Pope for candidacy. In January 1076, Henry took the dramatic step of summoning a synod of German bishops to declare Gregory deposed. This earned him excommunication, which would have been a serious matter, even if Henry's opportunistic vassals had not seized this opportunity to justify a general revolt; the Great Saxon Revolt (1077-88). The end result was that Henry had to give way. In one of the most dramatic of all confrontations of secular and spiritual authority, Henry came in humiliation to Canossa, where he waited in the snow barefoot until Gregory would receive his penance. But Gregory had not really won, his position was too extreme; he claim the right to depose a monarch, yet he himself should be judged by none. This was almost unthinkably subversive to men whose moral horizons were dominated by the idea of the sacredness of oaths of fealty. Both William the Conqueror of England and Philip II of France made their feeling abundantly clear by insisting they would not refrain from investing bishops with their offices. And despite his difficulties, Emperor Henry IV was far from beaten. He held a geographically central position that prevented his enemies from uniting to destroy him. With the death of his Rudolf of Rheinfelden at the Battle on the Elster (October 1080), the rebellion against Henry lost much of its momentum. In 1081, Henry marched on Rome, which he intermittently besieged for three years, before entering the city with his own Pope. Meanwhile, Gregory, safe in his virtually impregnable fortress of the Castel Sant'Angelo, appealed to the Normans to restore him to the papacy. The imperial forces withdrew from the city before they arrived in May 1084, but the Normans, seeing Rome defenseless, sacked the city so violently that Gregory had to flee south with his rescuers; he died a year later in Sicily. Though Gregory's successors acted less dramatically, the Investiture Controversy continued for several decades, providing the pretext for revolts that gradually took their toll. A compromise was eventually reached with the Concordat of Worms (1122), which established a subtle distinction between the spiritual and secular elements of high clerical offices. Though diplomatically disguised, it was clearly a papal victory; the Church would henceforth be an independent institution, and the early-medieval equilibrium had been shattered. The dispute did not end with Worms, and more would be heard in the next two centuries of papal claims for the distinction and superiority of papal authority. The excommunication of secular rulers would become a familiar theme of European politics: further disputes with emperors continued until northern Italy was lost to the empire entirely; and there was another spectacular quarrel in England over investiture, that ended with the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket of Canterbury. And military campaigns enjoyed papal support, most famously the First Crusade which Pope Urban II used to become the diplomatic leader of Europe’s monarchs; they now looked to Rome, not the empire. It was only in the 13th-century, that the ascendancy of the papacy met its match in a clash with King Philip IV of France. Meanwhile, the challenge thrown out by the papacy forced the secular rulers to seek new foundations for their position, and develop into secular bureaucratic states. The long struggle with the papacy had demonstrated the limits of imperial power, robbed the Holy Roman Empire of the great prestige it had previously enjoyed, and seen the Pope and German princes surface as major political players in the empire. In the coming centuries, political circumstances led the emperors to devolve more and more of their power, until imperial Germany fragmented into a tapestry of feudal states, with the holder of the imperial crown as little more than a figurehead. The Spanish Reconquest The origins of medieval Christian Spain lay in Christian Visigoths who had clung-on against the Muslim conquest of the early-8th-century, in the remote regions of north-western Iberia, alongside the ever independent Basques, protected by the Cantabrian Mountains. Aided by the establishment of another enclave around Barcelona by Charlemagne in the early 9th-century, the reconquest of Islamic Spain became an ideal of Spanish chivalry; the ''Reconquista (718-1492). It would take almost eight centuries of stirring victories and grievous reverses, during which different Christian kingdoms were almost as often at war with each other as with Muslims. One key ingredient was the cult of Santiago, the apostle James. James suffered martyrdom in Jerusalem 44 AD, but the saint's supposed tomb was miraculously discovered in Galicia in 813. A church and later a cathedral was built over the shrine, Santiago de Compostela, which rapidly became the third-most popular medieval pilgrimage destination after Rome and Jerusalem. This opened a crucial channel of communication between isolated northern Spain and the rest of Christendom. St. James became the special protector of soldiers in the ''Reconquista; he is today the patron saint of Spain. The early reconquest was a stuttering affair. The Christians nibbled away successfully at Umayyad Spain (756-1031) whenever it was distracted by internal problems, only for the territory to invariably be lost again. It was complicated by the high degree of positive culture contact in many parts of Spain between Christians and Muslims; as well as Jews, for there were many living in Spain. Christian kingdoms needed to maintain good relations with their Muslim neighbours simply to survive, while the Islamic world was remarkable for its tolerance of religious and ethnic minorities. Arabic sources mark clear that Christians often held high offices in Cordoba. Indeed one fanatical group of Christians was so upset at the contented attitude of their fellow Christians under Muslim rule, that they martyred themselves in the marketplace in Cordoba in about 850. Muslim Spain was of enormous importance to Europe, a door to the learning and science of the East; as was Norman Sicily. These included Latin translations of the Greek Classics and of Arabic texts on astronomy, mathematics, science, and medicine. Most immediately beneficial to Christendom was the more practical knowledge of agricultural irrigation techniques, such as crop rotation, improved animal husbandry, better irrigation, and the diffusion of new crops. In the 11th-century, religious fervour entered both camps. It came just after the blackest moment for the Christians, when the fearsome Muslim general al-Mansur (d. 1002) terrorised the north, sacking Barcelona in 985, Leon in 988, and the great cathedral city of Santiago de Compostela in 997. However, with his death, the Caliphate of Cordóba began to disintegrate, allowing the Christian states to breathe easily again. The first Cluniac monastery in Spain west of Barcelona was established at San Juan de la Peña in 1024. These reforming monks were not as impressed with Muslim grandeur as the Spanish had often been, and soon Spain was characterised by the same uncompromising and militant form of Christianity as the rest of Europe. This coincided with the Umayyad Caliphate plunging into civil war in 1031, and splintering into dozens of Muslim principalities that competed against each other. This period of anarchy gave the Christian kingdoms a welcome opportunity. In 1085 Alfonso VI of León and Castile (d. 1109) captured Toledo, the ancient seat of the Visigothic Kingdom. But this military success prompt a Muslim response, appealing for help to the Almoravid Sultanate (1147-1145), an austere fundamentalist Islamic sect centred in Morocco. With strictly disciplined armies of their own Moorish tribesmen, they had already conquered territories stretching from Tunisia to Algeria. Arrived in Spain in 1086, the Almoravids decisive defeated a coalition of Christian armies at the Battle of Sagrajas (October 1086), and stemmed their advance. Only on the east coast was the Muslim ascendancy significantly challenged by the buccaneering exploits of Rodrigo Diaz (d. 1099), known even in his own day as El Cid which means simply "lord" in Arabic. Although celebrated as a Christian hero, for most of his life El Cid fought with equal enthusiasm for rulers of either religion. In 1994, he besieged and captured the great Muslim city of Valencia, which he ruled as an independent principality, despite being deep in Muslim territory. Rodrigo remained undefeated against the Almoravid until his death in 1099, and his family had to abandon Valencia in 1102; it did not become a Christian city again for over 125 years. Though stricter in religion than the Umayyads, the Almoravid sultans continued the traditions of Muslim Spain, but soon lost control of both halves of their empire to another Moorish dynasty, with an even more fundamentalist interpretation of Islam. The Almohad Sultanate (1121–1269) conquered Morocco in 1147, and all of Muslim Spain was under their rule by 1172. The Almohad ascendancy continued until 1212, when they were defeated at the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa by an alliance of the Christian princes. This began the decisive phase of the Christian reconquest. Rise of the Muslim Seljuk Turks In the early 11th-century, the Muslim world was still home to a deep-rooted and sophisticated cultural life, but the once vast empire of the Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258) had ceased to exist in a political sense. Many of the independent Muslim states accepted the Caliphs in Baghdad as symbolic and religious figurehead, but by no means all; notably, openly hostile Shi'a Fatimid Egypt. Yet for a brief spell the Abbasids recovered some degree of prestige thanks to a central Asian people already introduced into this story; the Turks. The high plateau of Mongolia is rivalled only by Scandinavia as a region from which successive waves of peoples have emerged to prey upon more civilised neighbours. It was the original homeland of both Turkic peoples and Mongols. Mongolia lies at the extreme end of the Central Asian steppes, which runs like a huge corridor of open grassland from east to west for 4000 miles or so. Its northern wall is the Siberian forest mass; the southern is provided by deserts and great mountain ranges. Unlike the sudden eruption of the Mongols in the 13th-century, the migration west of different Turkic groups was a gradual and largely uncharted process. The life of a nomad, living constantly on the move between pastures with their flocks and herds, leaves few physical traces. It is only when these semi-nomadic peoples acquire power in some region that they can be glimpsed in the historical record. The Huns (370-469) who helped prompt the fall of the Western Roman Empire were probably at least partly Turkic, as were the Avars (580-804) who long troubled the Byzantines. Another Turkic group, the Bulgars, split from the Avars sometime after 600, and eventually settled in south-eastern Europe, where they mixed and assimilated with the Slavic population to become Bulgarians. Meanwhile, a series of large Turkic Khaganates long dominated the region north of the Black Sea and Caspian Sea, including the Khazars (650-969) and Pechenegs (860–1091). Turks are also said to have fought as mercenaries for both the Muslims and Tang Chinese at the Battle of Talas (751). Medieval Arabs recorded that the Turks looked different with broad faced people with small eyes, and noted their similarity to Tibetans. Like other nomadic peoples, they were renouned as horsemen. From about the 8th century, Turkic tribes to the east of the Abbasid Caliphate gradually succumbed to its powerful religious influence, abandoning their own shamanism for Islam. Two centuries later, they were playing an increasingly important role in the frontier defences of the Muslim world. But in the recurrent pattern of barbarians within civilisation, they have their own ideas. With the crumbling of the Persian Samanid Dynasty (819–999), a power vacuum was created in the east that was quickly filled by Turkic dynastries. In the vanguard was a Turkish officer called Sabuktigin (d. 997), who was put in command of the district around Ghazni (in modern day Afghanistan). When he died, his brilliant son Mahmud (d. 1030) treated it as his own kingdom. Over the next thirty years, he turned this tiny provincial city into the spectacular centre of an extensive empire; the Ghaznavid Dynasty (977–1186). Whenever the treasury was bare, he raided and plundered northern India, establishing the first firm Muslin foothold on the subcontinent in the process. Another group of Turkic tribes led in the early-11th-century by a chieftain called Seljuk was to create of a second Turkic empire, that produce an even deeper change in the Islamic world. The Seljuk Turkic Empire (1037-1194) was established by Tughril Beg (d. 1063) and his brother Chaghri. From their homeland east of the Caspian Sea (modern day Turkmenistan), the obvious stepping stone towards greater power was the wealth of the Ghaznavids. In 1037, they sacked Ghazni, while Mahmud's son Mas'ud (d. 1040) was campaigning in India. Mas'ud hurried home, only to be decisively defeated at the Battle of Dandanaqan (May 1040), and forced to abandon most of his western territories. From there, the Seljuks were well positioned to take advantage of the state of anarchy in Persia, ruled by many rival petty princes, most of them Shi'as. Slowly and methodically, Tughril Beg fought his way westwards through Persia, and by 1054 was contending Anatolia with the Byzantines. Seeing an opportunity to reunite the Muslim world, Abbasid Caliph Al-Qa'im (1031-75) welcomed Tughril Beg into Baghdad in 1055, and made him an astonishing offer. Though the Abbasids remained the overall head of the Islamic community with the religious title of Caliph, the Seljuk Turks were granted its political and military leadership as Sultan. He also gave them an ambitious task; to overwhelm the Shi'a Fatimids and bring Egypt back into the Sunni fold. This was beyond the powers of Tughril Beg, and his still somewhat unruly Turkish tribesmen. But for the next two generations the Seljuks retained control in Baghdad and governed a Muslim empire restored to extensive boundaries. In many ways, the Seljuks provoked the crusading zeal in the West. Warfare between the Seljuks and Fatimids naturally occurred in the border regions of Syria and Palestine, and caused great disruption to the Christian pilgrimage route to Jerusalem. At the same time, the Seljuks added Armenia and Georgia to their empire in 1064, for many centuries a disputed frontier region between the Byzantine and Islamic worlds. In 1068, they began overrunning Byzantine Anatolia, which prompted a response from Byzantine Emperor Romanus IV (1068-71). The two armies met at the Battle of Manzikert (1071), a resounding victory for the Seljuks and beginning the demise of the Byzantine Empire. Anatolia was completely laid open to the Turks. Seljuq power reach its zenith under the third Sultan Malikshāh I (1072-92), but when he was assassinated in 1092, the empire fell into chaos as rival successors and regional governors carved up the empire, and waged war against each other. Sensing an opportunity to regain his lost territory but in need of military muscle, Byzantine Emperor Alexios I (1081-1118) wrote a faithful letter to Pope Urban II (1088-99) asking for Western help. What he no doubt expected was mercenaries he could control; what he got was the First Crusaders. Category:Historical Periods